In most modern business offices, letters are created on a computer and printed on laser printers. Unfortunately, it is not usually convenient to address envelopes on laser printers because i) most laser printers are not well adapted for printing envelopes, ii) most laser printers are shared among several people, and iii) very few laser printers include means for feeding envelopes remotely. As a result most envelopes have continued to be addressed by typewriter. In addition to taking more time, and the necessity for keeping relatively large pieces of otherwise unneeded equipment in cramped offices, addressing by typewriter creates the possibility of errors, which is undesirable.
There has thus been a need for a product which will accept address data from a computer and produce an addressed envelope. To meet this need, machines have recently come on the market which produce labels from computer data using a thermal printing process. Many people object to using a label for their business correspondence, and in particular these labels, since they are made by a relatively low resolution thermal process, and hence not of letter quality.
It is an object of the present invention to produce high quality addresses directly on envelopes using computer generated address data.